Saturday, October 29, 2011

Here is some motivation for you: Wyolum is offering two "$1,000 Innovation Grant" to the most qualified open source project applications submitted from now until Dec 3, 2011.

From the "news release":

WyoLum, LLC’s mission is to “Promote Open Source Hardware”.
To that end, we are pleased to announce two $1000 (USD) grants to be awarded to the most qualified applicants.

Entries will be evaluated on:
● Innovation
● Originality
● Technical feasibility
● Commercial viability
● Planned use of funds
● Timeline (Projects with goals that can be achieved within six months after the grant is awarded will score more favorably.)

Qualifying projects will be 100% open source (hardware and software) from development through to production. WyoLum team members will be available for advice and assistance throughout your project. If you have a killer idea, but have never fabricated a PCB, programmed a micro-controller or designed an enclosure, don’t let that stop you from submitting your idea. If we can’t immediately assist you, we will learn it together.

Submit completed applications to grants@wyolum.com by December 3, 2011. Applications will be excepted in a combination of video (encouraged), html, .odt, .doc, .docx, blogpost. We will make all reasonable efforts to receive and evaluate your application.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

You have a Megga Jr RGB "game console" from EMSL and you are tired of playing or writing new games for it. How about making it into a clock?
This takes a bit of hardware hacking on your side; I provide the basic-clock-functionality sketch (download here).
In the end, the "Meggy Jr Clock" will look and work as shown in this video.

Here is a list of what you need (beside an working Meggy Jr):

DS1307 and a 8-pin socket;

crystal (32768Hz);

coin battery (CR1220) and a holder for it;

a small piece of prototyping board;

2 pieces of 6-pin female header;

6-pin right-angle male header;

a few wires.

We will start with hacking the Meggy Jr board, which involves 3 steps:

connect, with a short piece of wire the 2 points as shown in the picture below.

The hacked Meggy Jr board will look as shown in this photo:

Next, we will build, on prototyping board, the circuit for the real-time-clock based on DS1307, as shown in the datasheet. We will use the 32768Hz crystal and the 3V coin battery (CR1220, with holder).

There are two requirements for the small RTC board we are building:

it will have a pair of 6-pin male headers that plug into the new headers we just installed on the Meggy Jr board;

it needs to fit in the small space above the processor, between the Meggy Jr edges, the buttons and the LED matrix.

So here is how we are going to do it:

- cut the piece of prototyping board to size;

- place it on the spot, above the headers;

- solder the 2 headers (which are already plugged in the female headers);

- place and wire the RTC circuitry;

- solder the new FTDI connector (6-pin right angle male header) at the top of the board, close to the edge (above the old one we removed);

- connect each of the 6 pins of the FTDI connector to the pins of the top header.

The little RTC board you built may look like in the photos below (both sides shown).

Now we put them together (plug the RTC board into the headers) and start testing.

The Meggy Jr Clock we just built will look something like this:

First, make sure the new FTDI connector works, by uploading any sketch.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Justin and Wyolum Co. also promised (wink, wink) that the next revision of I2SD will have the needed digital pins accessible through headers.

This "mixed breed wise clock" is using the I2SD (with on-board RTC and SD card), the display (and idea) from Book Clock, and code borrowed and adapted from Wise Clock 2.

Missing are the user buttons and a tilt switch, which may be connected to the free A0/D15 - A3/D18 pins available on the header of the I2SD board. (Note: The buttons and the tilt switch should be also supported in software as well, code which can be copied from the existing Wise Clock 2 and Book Clock sketches.)

In other words, I2SD is equivalent to Arduino + Adafruit Logging shield, but equipped with a better RTC (DS3231 instead of DS1307). And it is much smaller. And cheaper (I think).

One of the essential ingredients in making the clock is the display. I chose to use the simpler 3208 LED display because it requires only 3 wires (CS, WR, DATA) in addition to the Vcc and GND and it's easier to manage in software (requires less code).

First, we need to realize that this is a hack. I2SD was not designed to be used as a full-fledged Arduino. Most of the digital pins are not accessible through headers. Well, in our case, we only need access to 3 digital pins. It just happens that D5, D6, D7 and D9 are connected to some test points, basically holes where we can solder wires. It also happens that in other 3208-related sketches, I used these almost same pins as well. So, we will connect the nicely aligned D6, D7 and D9 to DATA (pin 7), WR (pin 5) and CS2 (pin 1), respectively, as shown in the photos.

The rig is a helper for the display connector. If you want to follow the same idea, this is the sequence of actions:

solder the 3 wires to the I2SD board, on the top side;

on the rig board, solder the connector (near the side) and the wires (to pins 1, 5, 7, 15 and 16);

solder the three I2SD wires (D6, D7, D9) to the rig.

It is now time to run the test sketch. It requires a small change in line 31, where we replace 8 with 9 (as I said earlier, we are using the easier-to-access D9 instead of the usual D8).

Note: Make sure you know how to handle the 3208 display you have, since there are two different types (see this post).

Now that Test_3208.pde runs successfully, we will work on integrating the SD card and RTC into the software (which shouldn't be a problem, since I will just copy chunks of tested code from the older sketches). The clock will alternate between displaying the quotes from SD card and displaying the time from RTC. Stay tuned.

PS It's worth mentioning that even with this hack applied, I2SD can still be used as initially intended: none of the headers was taken over and all connectors are still accessible. Nice and clean hack :)

Saturday, October 15, 2011

I am sure many of you will find this trivial, but since I couldn't see any reference to something similar, I thought I should document it.

This hack allows you to measure tilt with a 90 degrees "accuracy" in a vertical (or I should say "non-horizontal") plan, basically to determine the orientation "up", "down", "left" or "right".

You will need 2 simple tilt switches and 3 resistors, wired as in the schematic below and assembled on a piece of prototyping board as shown in the photo.

It is important to place the 2 tilt switches as shown, 45 degrees on each side of the "vertical" axis. The little board now becomes the "2D tilt sensor". It is shown connected to the Arduino with 3 wires: Vcc (red), GND (black) and A1 (white-orange). I used axial tilt switches, but radial (as those sold by adafruit) work as well.

The voltage on analog input A1 of Arduino is dependent on the orientation of the 2D tilt sensor. I selected the value of the resistors so that the voltages are spread as much as possible over the 5V range.

Basically, by closing any or both of the switches, unique voltage dividers will be created. By reading the voltage on the analog pin we can easily figure out the orientation of the 2D tilt sensor.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Many people are building stuff using the 3208 LED display from Sure, based on projects I have shown here (e.g. BookClock). The test code I published doesn't work "out of the box" with these newer displays. So they ask the question: why? Here is the answer.

The "older" 0832 LED display uses the HT1632 chip. The "newer" 3208 (which comes with either 3mm or 5mm LEDs) uses the slightly different HT1632C chip. (Note that HT1632C chip is also used in the bi-color 3216 displays.)
The difference between these two chips, from the software perspective, is in the initialization procedure.

Here is part of the ht1632_setup() function for the 0832 display (with HT1632):

Saturday, October 1, 2011

A while ago I received the good-looking I2SD kit from Wyolum. This is another open source project created and generously shared by the same team that brought us ClockTHREE and C3Jr.

The I2SD kit is pictured below. As you can see, it is mostly SMD (0805 and SOIC packages). Not for a novice, but definitely easy to solder by anyone with a steady hand and a good pair of eyes.

As always, when I assemble a kit, I try to skip the "read the manual" part. I don't recommend this to anyone though. This is just a test for me to assess how user-friendly the kit is. (Note: Ironically, this test would fail for my own Wise Clock 3 kit because of the 3 resistors of 4K7. One really need to know exactly where those resistors go (R5, R6 and R7). An improvement in a future version of Wise Clock 3 would be to have the resistor values on the silkscreen, as C3Jr has.)
Well, the I2SD kit passed the "no manual required" test, which means that the kit is well thought and designed. Again, if you are not sure what you are doing, you should not attempt building this kit without reading the documentation first.

The next photos show the top and bottom sides of the assembled I2SD, with the SD card inserted into the socket.

As you can notice from the photos, I2SD has an on-board ATmega328, thus making it an (software-wise) Arduino-compatible. It also has an SD socket, an RTC chip (DS3231) with backup battery, and the 6-pin FTDI connector.

The I2SD was designed to be used as an Arduino storage peripheral, linked with Arduino devices on I2C.
For this purpose, the I2SD runs a sketch that:
- receives "read" commands from a host and returns the required data it reads from the SD card file;
- receives "write" commands from the host and stores the data in the SD card file.

As mentioned above, the I2SD itself can be used as a standalone Arduino (since the ATmega328 has the bootloader). To test it, I uploaded (with the Arduino IDE 22) this sketch which writes to the file TEST.TXT on the SD card.

I2SD can be integrated within many devices requiring data storage and retrieval, ranging from data logging (the RTC chip is definitely helping here), to system configuration, image capturing etc.